hey all you audio experts of the forum.i've been interested in lossless music for a long time and i got almost all of my knowledge about it from this forum.i have an issue that i'm trying to figure out, and i've searched everywhere possible for info about it but i couldn't find any.so you guys are my last resort, i hope you can help...here's the issue :

i download many lossless albums all the time (WAV,APE,ALAC,FLAC), but i only keep to myself those few songs (if any) from each album, those songs that i liked the most.most albums are ripped with gap detection so they begin with silence and end with silence, but there are some albums that don't, albums such as :

mixed albums (where the songs dissolve into each other)live albums (where the tracks begin and end with the audience clapping or shouting)one track albums (where there are no gaps or pauses between tracks)

i find it very annoying to listen to songs that comes from albums like the above, so i fix it using audacity, i fade in, and fade out, add some silence if necessary (using the "generate - silence" option), the thing is i can't help thinking maybe i am turning this perfect lossless file into a lossy one, and by doing so actually creating a fake lossless (since i'm always exporting as flac), my ears can't hear any difference, but still, you know way more than i do about these things.

so please tell me, does the "fade in / fade out / add silence" processes make a lossless file lossy?

sorry if my english is bad, i hope it's understandable, and if you find any mistakes please correct me.

Fade in and out is lossy. You cannot recover the original signal where the volume has been altered. This should be obvious if you consider the point where it faded to silence. You can't turn silence into music by amplyfing it.